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google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update (www.autom.dev)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 20 points 2 months ago (3 children)

The real URL is in the Location header on /goto. Request that URL. Do not follow the redirect.

…but that's how you follow a redirect?

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  • [–] 19 points 2 months ago

    You're right, and this article is spouting nonsense. If you have to request the /goto link in order to get the URL then you've already been tracked by Google (or blocked if they think you're a scraper), and following the Location header is exactly what your browser would do anyway. That's how HTTP redirects work.

    This article is from a company that offers APIs to just proxy Google search results, so they're exactly the kind of people that Google is trying to block with this change. Reading some other posts on their site (eg. the one that explains how to follow the Location header) there are obvious signs of slop, so this whole article is probably an AI hallucination.

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  • [–] -4 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    One is under your control. The other is being passed through a script on the server that may be doing who-knows-what in addition to redirecting you.

    (Better if you just drop Google altogether.)

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago

    No? If you want to resolve this URI, you have to follow the redirect, there's no way around it. Requesting it from google and looking at the Location header is following the redirect.

    I mean, I agree that one should drop google and that this is probably just another thing they do to track people, but that's not what I meant with that comment.

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